Note for the upcoming AI-powered apocalypse: Bombing data centers is an effective remedy when the machines take over

This also has happened in other counties before. I know the US likes to see itself as special but the overall patterns of fascist government takeovers and more gradual democratic backsliding have been well established by history and political science.

Because Neo-Royalism

But consider this:

Let’s say the raw talent in e.g. Skeleton bob are normally distributed around the world.

So of the top 10000 most talented people in Skeleton, about 1700 of those would be born in China, about 6 in Norway - a factor of about 280x difference.

So to offset the ‘natural talent’ disadvantage of low population size, Norway would need to be 280x more effective in discovering the talent available in their population than China.

And I think that’s pretty reasonable to suppose; consider e.g. likelihood of being exposed to a highly specific winter sport in your youth, likelihood of living in a geographical area where talent could show itself (i.e. the mountains), likelihood your family has the material means to support a niche winter sport in the first place until you are discovered, etc.

By my rough estimate, any of these likelihoods are way higher for any given Norwegian child due to cultural, socio-economic and other structural factors.

So while e.g. China might have the greater raw pool of talent in Skeleton compared to Norway, at the end of the day, Norway probably offsets this through better talent discovery in this niche discipline. So the raw talent of the roster of people walking into the Olympic training camps is likely pretty comparable.

(Note that this argument is not about China, Norway, or Skeleton specifically but about nieces and structural filters in talent discovery. In a discipline like 200m free style swimming where China has massive discovery potential the numbers of course weigh considerably heavier)

It would be interesting to actually do the math regarding how much of a predictor population size is.

I’d guess that beyond a relatively low saturation level of a few millions you get enough people with raw talent in each given population that the other factors you listed (funding, methods, support structures, etc.) make the actual difference

But the US only completed as one country in each discipline while each country in Europe has the chance to earn a medal for ‘Europe’. To make it comparable, either

1. each US state would have needed to field their own team and you average over the number of teams or

2. EU and the US would have needed to compete with one team each per competition

that said, Europe is indeed very successful at the Olympics per capita

Yes and the other kid was just a spinless little asshole who needed to learn that irl actions have consequences.

From how the rest of the interaction went I’m afraid that’s the opposite of what he learned after the police intervened

How about someone makes this for real? The world needs screaming goat pillows!?

Absolutely, it’s definitely one of the major areas work on the Matrix standard is needed.

There is an MSC (= a spec change proposal) from September 2025 where the folks at Element proposed a solution for how to do this going forward: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/3414?ref=element.io

This blog article explains it more clearly: https://element.io/blog/hiding-room-metadata-from-servers/

Wire wrote that article in summer last year to prevent the German IT-Planning Council from adopting Matrix as the communications layer for its consolidated interfederal government-to-citizen messaging infrastructure in the public administration.

So be aware that, to my knowledge, this article is not a good-faith tech blog post but part of public affairs campaign / lobbying attempt.

Would be neat to have meta data encrypted in Matrix, but it’s not a deal breaker for most use cases imo.

Which client do you refer to regarding the bad UX, Element Web?

Matrix is just the protocol. There are a bunch of different clients though that all implement Matrix but are made by different people: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

There is a difference between funding of the Matrix foundation and the matrix.org instance vs. funding for the companies working in the ecosystem. The Matrix foundation has been struggling financially, yes. But the companies using and contributing to the Matrix standard are doing quite well from what I know - though they should probably cough up a little more money to find the overhead and the public matrix infrastructure imo

Correction they are actually moving away from the Matrix federation scheme in favor of their own federation mechanism to simplify the internal architecture (but they are still supporting Matrix financially apparently :)

Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It’s not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year

This is the most recent update report on the ECB’s ongoing work to establish a rulebook: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/timeline/profuse/shared/pdf/ecb.derdgp251030_RDG_progress_report_October_25.en.pdf?d978acf24c059027f1372a4f42155ac9

Turns out it’s a pretty massive undertaking that could tank the economy if you get it wrong, so I can see how it might take a few more years

The EUDI Wallets have/had that as a requirement in their spec but it has been heavily criticized, no idea if it will persist though

I have high hopes for the Digital Euro.

To have a digital payment medium that is issued by the central bank and can be exchanged without fees as a 1:1 digital equipment of cash would be amazing and go beyond just replacing American credit card providers.

Honestly, online service platforms have come up with so many odd and manipulated behavioural patterns they shove down their customers’ throat as long as it makes them money…

If an A/B test actually showed that offering to pick up your food from a traffic accident site led to better customer satisfaction outcomes than just cancelling the order I seem them doing this 100%

You’re probably right in this specific case; this seems suspiciously one-sided. Do you have a link to the source where they explain their methods?

Generally something like this can happen though, especially if you do e.g. random dialing on the landline to survey people; mostly older people still use landlines and mostly retired people actually pick up during office hours. A good social scientist would obviously try to measure and control for those sampling errors though, not make them on purpose to get pre-determined results.

Ganz da treten etwas die Nachteile dieses Modells zu Tage: Vielen Stammwählen einzelner Partien ist es tatsächlich nicht so wichtig wer konkret die Spitzenkandidatur inne hat. Umgekehrt sind sich manchmal Parteien auf Grundlage von Kandidaten erfolgreich und legitimieren damit ihr Wahlprogramme, ohne, dass die politischen Inhalte im Kleingedruckten im Wahlkampf im Fokus standen.

Hat halt alles seine Vor- und Nachteile